How Good is Your Digital Marketing Strategy – Part Two?

Last week I took a look at digital marketing best practices and discussed the importance of identifying your target audience before embarking on a strategy.  You can find that information here.

Once you have identified who you want to reach, you’ll want to set some goals for how you’re going to do that.

Setting digital marketing goals is a key step toward proving (and improving) the value of your efforts. Writing your goals down and regularly reporting on your progress also significantly increases the likelihood that you will achieve what you set out to do.  Setting realistic goals will help you chart a course for success.

Here are three easy steps to setting digital marketing goals.

1. Conduct a digital marketing audit. Before you can start thinking about what you want to achieve, you need a clear picture of where you stand right now. A digital marketing audit will help you record all your programs in one place. You’ll also get a sense of your current level of performance, which you can use as a baseline.

2. Decide what’s important. Once you’ve completed your audit, look through the information you’ve gathered. You’ll start to see which digital channels are performing well, and which might need a different focus. Also look at what’s really important for you to achieve. Sure, vanity metrics are fun to track. But can you tie these simple measures directly to business goals? Will increasing your likes lead to real business value? Decide what kind of growth or improvement can really help improve your business, then start crafting some specific digital marketing goals.

3. Choose your goal-setting framework. Anyone can pull a lofty goal out of thin air, but that won’t help you improve your business results or even measure progress. For your digital marketing goals to be useful, they need to be realistic and trackable. They also need to be tied to clear objectives that will help you make progress. Established goal-setting frameworks help you put in the work upfront to create meaningful goals that will support your business in the long run.

Next week we’ll look at the final piece of the effort – measurement.